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Redefining an Imperial Collection: Problems of Modern Impositions and Interpretations

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Redefining an Imperial Collection: Problems of Modern Impositions and Interpretations Redefining an imperial collection: problems of modern impositions and interpretations Nicole T.C. Chiang Introduction In 1924, when Aisin Gioro Puyi, the last emperor of China, was driven out of the imperial palaces, the Republican government formed the Committee for the Disposition of the Qing Imperial Possessions and took a comprehensive inventory of the objects in the Forbidden City.1 According to the committee’s twenty-eight volumes of reports, which were first published in 1925, the Qing court had left more than one million objects including bronzes, jades, ceramics paintings, calligraphy, enamel wares, lacquer wares and many other miscellaneous articles.2 Although many objects were accumulated by successive Qing rulers, it was the Qianlong emperor who was most responsible for the formation of the former palace riches. The Qianlong emperor came to the throne in 1736 at the age of twenty-five as the sixth emperor of the Manchu-led Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and abdicated voluntarily sixty years later as a filial act in order not to reign longer than his grandfather, the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662-1722). His reign witnessed the most prosperous time of the Qing dynasty as the economy flourished, the population grew and the territory expanded. In the heyday of the dynasty, his court amassed numerous cultural riches from all over China and beyond. The huge span of objects gathered together during the reign of the Qianlong emperor has deeply influenced the present understanding of the history of Chinese art. It has been pointed out that ‘surviving into museum collections to this day, the enormous store of cultural riches amassed by the Qianlong emperor has sometimes come to seem as if it is Chinese culture, and the material excluded by him has been correspondingly marginalised, or has not been preserved.’3 The extant objects from 1 Pinyin romanisation is used in this paper for Chinese unless when citing secondary sources which use other methods of Chinese romanisation. Wherever names can be identified to be of Manchu origin, the romanisation follows the rules regulated in Paul Georg von Möllendorff, A Manchu Grammar, Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1892; Committee for the Disposition of the Qing Imperial Possessions: 清室善後委員會(Qingshi shanhou weiyuanhui). 2 The inventory was republished in 2004, see: Qingshi shanhou weiyuanhui 清室善後委員會, Gugong wupin diancha baogao 故宮物品點查報告, 1925, Beijing: Xianzhuang shuju, 2004. 3 Craig Clunas, ‘Picturing Cosmic Grandeur’, The Qianlong Emperor: Treasures from the Forbidden City, Edinburgh: National Museum of Scotland, 2002, 15. Journal of Art Historiography Number 10 June 2014 Nicole T.C. Chiang Redefining an imperial collection: problems of modern impositions and interpretations the Qianlong court have had a long-standing impact on the formation of knowledge and connoisseurship of Chinese art as a scholarly discipline. Present scholarship is built on the presumption that there was a single, readily definable imperial collection which contained a monumental amalgamation of objects of art assembled by the Qianlong emperor, whose ambition was to possess all categories of objects and declare his legitimacy as the supreme ruler by establishing his image as the owner of the greatest collection in Chinese history.4 This presumption has been taken for granted and has never been questioned before. However, the present view of the collection does not take into account that the phrase ‘imperial art collection’ contains many notions that are of European origin and may not be a very precise description for the objects actually collected at the Qing imperial court in eighteenth-century China. This paper will challenge the assumed popular identity of the so-called Qianlong imperial art collection, which will be argued, has been constructed largely with modern Eurocentric views. By applying philological and historiographical analysis, the paper intends to re-establish the definition and description of the actual collection in its original context. It will be demonstrated that the collection was not necessarily an assemblage of works of art and that it was not as monumental as previously assumed. In addition, the paper includes a discussion of how the perception of objects accumulated by the Qing imperial court as one entity was formed in the early twentieth century. It will be argued that it was the financial pressure faced by the Qing imperial household and the rise of nationalism that contributed to the disappearance of the boundary between collectibles and non- collectibles. Overall, this paper will challenge the ‘canon’ that has been constituted around the collection after the twentieth century and provide an alternative view towards imperial collecting and objects assembled in the eighteenth-century Chinese imperial court. 4 There are numerous studies related to the subject. Only a selected few are referenced here as examples: Fong Weng and James C.Y. Watt, eds, Possessing the Past: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996; Feng Ming- chu 馮明珠, ed, Qianlong huangdi de wenhua daye 乾隆皇帝的文化大業 (Emperor Ch’ien-lung’s Grand Cultural Enterprise), Taipei: National Palace Museum, 2002; Jessica Rawson and Evelyn Rawski, eds, China: The Three Emperor, 1662-1795, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2005. Harold L. Kahn, ‘A Matter of Taste: The Monumental and Exotic in the Qianlong Reign’, The Elegant Brush: Chinese Painting under the Qianlong Emperor 1735-1795, Phoenix, AZ: Phoenix Art Museum, 1985, 288-302; Michèle Pirazzoli-t’Serstevens, ‘La collection impériale sous Yongzheng (1723-1735) et Qianlong (1736-1795), son impact sur la création artistique et sur l’histoire de l’art chinois’, Autour des collections d’art en Chine au XVIIIe siècle, Genève: Libraririe Droz, 2008, 3-27; Rosemary E. Scott, ‘The Chinese Imperial Collections’, Collecting Chinese Art: Interpretation and Display, Colloquies on Art and Archaeology in Asia no.20, London: SOAS, Percival David Foundation, 2000, 19-32. 2 Nicole T.C. Chiang Redefining an imperial collection: problems of modern impositions and interpretations Reinstating the meaning of ‘art’ What defines a work of art has been an ongoing debate in the modern Western world. It has been suggested that a work of art is an aesthetic object that possesses distinctive expressive and symbolic properties which can stimulate viewers and be perceived by spectators.5 It also has been argued that a work of art is not the physical object itself but the specific pattern of colour, line, tone, mass and texture it presents.6 An object could also be identified as a work of art by examining the bond between the original intention of the artist, the final product and its historical context. In other words, something is art if it was or has been intended to be regarded as art.7 A work of art may not even be a tangible object but the act or the process of expressing one’s emotions.8 There seems to be no conclusive answer to whether a work of art is a physical object, an abstract entity or something that only exists in the mental experience of an artist or a viewer. Anything could seem to be turned into a work of art. The modern Western understanding of fine art, however, is a modern invention that has a history of barely two hundred years. Larry Shiner argues in his book The Invention of Art that the line between art and craft was drawn during the eighteenth century as a result of key social transformations in Europe. Before the eighteenth century, the English word ‘art’, derived from the Latin ars and Greek techne, signified any human activity performed with skill and the opposite of art was not craft but nature. However, after what Shiner calls ‘the Great Division’ in the eighteenth century, the universality of the modern European idea of art as ‘fine art’ as opposed to ‘craft’ has been taken for granted and applied to all people and periods of time.9 Similarly, what has been written about the supposed imperial art collection or Chinese art in general is often predicated on the assumed Eurocentric meaning for the word ‘art’. Craig Clunas has pointed out that ‘Chinese art is a quite recent invention, not much more than a hundred years old’ and it was created in the nineteenth century in Europe and North America to allow ‘statements to be made about, and values to be ascribed to, a range of types of objects.’10 Before the nineteenth century, painting, sculpture ceramics and calligraphy were not grouped together as objects ‘constituting part of the same field of inquiry’.11 Despite Clunas’s warning, what the equivalent word for ‘art’ in Chinese meant in eighteenth-century China has not been properly investigated, and how objects that may be described as 5 Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1981; Monroe C. Beardsley, The Aesthetic Point of View, Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1982. 6 Eddy Zemach, ‘No Identification without Evaluation’. British Journal of Aesthetics, 26: 1986, 239-251. 7 Jerrold Levinson, Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. 8 Robin George Collingwood, The Principles of Art, London: Oxford University Press, 1958. 9 Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. 10 Craig Clunas, Art in China, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 9. 11 Clunas, Art in China: 9. 3 Nicole T.C. Chiang Redefining an imperial collection: problems of modern impositions and interpretations works of art today were actually perceived prior to the nineteenth century has not been examined either. Thus the modern concept of ‘Chinese art’ continues to affect our perception of the so-called Qianlong imperial collection as an agglomeration of works of art. In modern-day Chinese, two terms are generally translated to the English word ‘art’ or ‘arts’.
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